Friday night was filled with some usual touring. The first was Family Night at Tesla Motors. My step brother works there and this was a major night for the company, although the next night was the party for people who have actually purchased the car. He did an internship there while working on his MBA and then got hired there after graduation, and has only lived out there for a few months. If you are not familiar with Tesla motors, this is the first all electric car that is available to the public. While they will only produce just over 1,000 cars in their first year (this coming year), they will be able to do like 20,000 a year after that at full capacity at this factory, which by the way is HUGE!

Inside they had some displays set up to show us the machines and how they work in order to build the car. There were some crazy machines, for sure, and they move around, taking pieces from one place to another. You can see in these pictures a sample of the car and the inside of the factory, including the robot type machines that build the car.

These machines follow along on the black lines. I have seen this with toy cars before but never realized that bug machines could utilize this as well.

Here is Amanda posing by one of the cars.

Any thoughts what goes on here?

If you guessed that it moves the cars around, you are right!

These machines move quickly. Some seriously crazy robots!

As you can see, everyone was fascinated with these.

Here is a stamping machine. It stamps out and molds the parts of the car.

As you can see, this is a huge machine.

Here is the alpha prototype model, and the car they are releasing now is the beta model (boy, I hope I got that right).

Pretty neat! Much thanks to my step brother Mark for inviting us out to see where he works and get an inside look at the release if this new car.

After the Tesla tour, we headed to the Winchester Mystery Tour in San Jose.

This is one neat and spooky place. Being that Halloween is approaching, we decided to do the night time flash light tour of the mansion and then go in the haunted maze outside.

Here is a model of this gigantic house, gingerbread style.

Check out Amanda, with her pretty purple wig, posing with some Winchester rifles.

I could't take pictures inside, but let me just tell you a little about the story and legend of this place. Sarah Winchester was married to the guy who owned Winchester rifles (I think his dad started the company). In a short period her baby and her husband died so she looked to a psychic for help. She was told that the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifle were haunting her and they were to blame. She was to move to the west coast and build a house that the spirits would get lost in, so she needed to renovate and change the house often. Over the years she changed it hundreds of times, and had confusing additions put in, like doors leading to the ceiling or nowhere, and staircases that ended at walls. So, you can imagine this was super spooky at night with only a flashlight to lead the way.

After the tour we entered the haunted maze, which was a lot of fun. Since it was Amanda's idea, we let her go first and I followed behind. Yeah, we made her get the brunt of the people jumping out to scare us. They did a great job and put on a nice show. After that we headed across the street to grab a late dinner, but not much was open. At least the falafel place was open and ready to serve us some tasty treats.

Amanda is happily awaiting her falafel.

We also tried out the feta cheese fries. I like this idea much better than cheese sauce on my fries.

This thing was huge and wrapped more like a burrito.

But it was certainly tasty!

It was a really fun night.

Now, for some reason my server hates Blogger and I seem to be unable to blog on the website, or even look at those blogs on blogger. I plan to try restarting my modem and hope that helps. In the mean time I am using Mars Edit on my Mac to get this typed and I hope, hope, hope it posts to my blog. I am still new to this program so I wanted to add links, but I haven't figured that out yet, and I am super busy with some work projects right now, so as soon as I can figure those things out I hope to be back in business with posting. If you have any suggestions for blogger, let me know.

Questions: Have you ever heard of Tesla Motors? Have you ever heard of the Winchester Mystery House?

Posted by
MelindaRD
at
4:25 PM
Friday, October 21, 2011

6 comments:

I want to go to this house!! I love haunted houses. And this story sounds super intriguing. I haven't been to a haunted house in YEARS and whenever we did go, they were lame. I love it when there is a story behind the house, one that is at least partially realistic :)

That looks like a really interesting tour of the factory. As for the 2nd part, well, I'm anti-haunted house. :) I hate being scared. I can handle a movie, but don't want the scary guys standing right next to me! I think the last one I went to was for my 16th b-day. Well, unless you count the one at Disney which isn't too scary at all.

You got my attention again with the 3rd part. Love the idea of feta fries and that falafel looks amazing!